7 Critical Reading Strategies 5g3k4o

http://www.salisbury.edu/counseling/new/7_critical_reading_strategies.html 7 CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES 1. Previewing: Learning about a text before really reading it. Previewing enables readers to get a sense of what the text is about and how it is organized before reading it closely. This simple strategy includes seeing what you can learn from the headnotes or other introductory material, skimming to get an overview of the content and organization, and identifying the rhetorical situation. 2. Contextualizing: Placing a text in its historical, biographical, and cultural contexts. When you read a text, you read it through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of the words on the page and their significance is informed by what you have come to know and value from living in a particular time and place. But the texts you read were all written in the past, sometimes in a radically different time and place. To read critically, you need to contextualize, to recognize the differences between your contemporary values and attitudes and those represented in the text. 3. Questioning to understand and : Asking questions about the content. As students, you are accustomed (I hope) to teachers asking you questions about your reading. These questions are designed to help you understand a reading and respond to it more fully, and often this technique works. When you need to understand and use new information though it is most beneficial if you write the questions, as you read the text for the first time. With this strategy, you can write questions any time, but in difficult academic readings, you will understand the material better and it longer if you write a question for every paragraph or brief section. Each question should focus on a main idea, not on illustrations or details, and each should be expressed in your own words, not just copied from parts of the paragraph. 4. Reflecting on challenges to your beliefs and values: Examining your personal responses. The reading that you do for this class might challenge your attitudes, your unconsciously held beliefs, or your positions on current issues. As you read a text for the first time, mark an X in the margin at each point where you feel a personal challenge to your attitudes, beliefs, or status. Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. What patterns do you see? 5. Outlining and summarizing: Identifying the main ideas and restating them in your own words.

Outlining and summarizing are especially helpful strategies for understanding the content and structure of a reading selection. Whereas outlining reveals the basic structure of the text, summarizing synopsizes a selection's main argument in brief. Outlining may be part of the annotating process, or it may be done separately (as it is in this class). The key to both outlining and summarizing is being able to distinguish between the main ideas and the ing ideas and examples. The main ideas form the backbone, the strand that holds the various parts and pieces of the text together. Outlining the main ideas helps you to discover this structure. When you make an outline, don't use the text's exact words. Summarizing begins with outlining, but instead of merely listing the main ideas, a summary recomposes them to form a new text. Whereas outlining depends on a close analysis of each paragraph, summarizing also requires creative synthesis. Putting ideas together again -- in your own words and in a condensed form -shows how reading critically can lead to deeper understanding of any text. 6. Evaluating an argument: Testing the logic of a text as well as its credibility and emotional impact. All writers make assertions that they want you to accept as true. As a critical reader, you should not accept anything on face value but to recognize every assertion as an argument that must be carefully evaluated. An argument has two essential parts: a claim and . The claim asserts a conclusion -- an idea, an opinion, a judgment, or a point of view -- that the writer wants you to accept. The includes reasons (shared beliefs, assumptions, and values) and evidence (facts, examples, statistics, and authorities) that give readers the basis for accepting the conclusion. When you assess an argument, you are concerned with the process of reasoning as well as its truthfulness (these are not the same thing). At the most basic level, in order for an argument to be acceptable, the must be appropriate to the claim and the statements must be consistent with one another. 7. Comparing and contrasting related readings: Exploring likenesses and differences between texts to understand them better. Many of the authors we read are concerned with the same issues or questions, but approach how to discuss them in different ways. Fitting a text into an ongoing dialectic helps increase understanding of why an author approached a particular issue or question in the way he or she did.

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Barretts Taxonomy Barrett's taxonomy of reading comprehension 5. Appreciation (Highest) Students give an emotional or image-based response. 4. Evaluation Students make judgments in light of the material. 3. Inference Students respond to information implied but not directly stated. 2. Reorganization Students organize or order the information in a different way than it was presented. 1. Literal (Lowest) Students identify information directly stated. Have a look through your textbook. There's a good chance you'll find a very high percentage of questions and tasks that deal with literal comprehension -- the very lowest level. How can we expect students to function at a higher level when we don't challenge them to? I'll try to share some ideas for doing that. Literal comprehension Even though this is the lowest level, I am not suggesting it isn't important. It is. Understanding literal meaning is the first step toward a deeper meaning. Also, for many of our students, tests are or will be very important. Most comprehension tests focus on literal comprehension because it is the easiest to test. That doesn't, however, mean we are locked into the old "read and regurgitate" pattern of teacher questioning. For example, if the learners have a reading age and have to find an answer, make copies of the questions and the answer key -- about one copy for each group of five students. One learner in each group becomes "quizmaster." Everyone in the group turns their book face down on their desk. The quizmaster reads the question twice to make sure everyone understands, then says, "Go!" The other students look at their book and scan to find the answer. When they do, they show their partners where the answer is. This is useful since it encourages speed and scanning, two skills that help learners deal with real text and tests. Reorganization Jigsaws -- tasks where different students have different information or different parts of the same information -- can be a way of having learners reorganize information. Stories that are cut up or sequences of pictures can be a route in. Those pictures can then be rearranged to have the learners come up with their own stories. At the simplest level, you can write a sequence of events on the

board. Write them in the wrong order. Have the students listen to or read a story and determine the sequence.

Inference Inference is reading (or listening, or thinking) "between the lines." Learners are looking for information that is in the text even though it isn't stated directly. Inference is a higher level processing skill. For that reason, it is left out of many elementary materials. That's a big mistake. Although it is higher level thinking, it is at the elementary level when students still lack vocabulary, grammar and other linguistic knowledge that they most need to "mentally fill in the blanks." In some ways, inference is easy to add to other tasks. Simply predicting the end to a story is inference. So it's making guesses about how a character would act or things they would and wouldn't say. Unless it is already stated explicitly, identifying the emotions of a character is usually inference. Regardless of what we do, the key is to get them to notice -- and identify -- the reasons they made the guess. This is usually the words or phrases that gave them the hints. By having students share those hints with each other, they both become more aware of what they are doing as learners and help other students who didn't pick up on the hints. Evaluation The term sounds sophisticated (and it can be). But often, this can be as simple as sorting fact from opinion, same/different and good or bad. Students can, for example, read a story and decide which character is the most like their own personality. Again, it is useful to go beyond the evaluation and ask the awareness questions: Why do you think so? How did you know? I know many teachers in Japan will roll their eyes at the idea of students actually stating their opinions. They can, but it takes issues they have opinions about. It can also be useful to provide task . One way to do this is to make cards with 8-12 opinion phrases like I think __________ because __________ . I can see your point, but __________ . I disagree. I think __________ . Copy the cards and give a copy to each student. They put the cards on the table. They discuss the topic (one given or, ideally, one they have come up with or selected.). Other months, I've mentioned Language Planning as a way to prepare for activities. It is a good idea to give the students a minute or two of silence to think about what they want to say and how to say it. Appreciation This is the highest level of processing. That means one of the sophisticated, yet elegantly simple, questions you can ask is, "Did you like the story? Why or why not?" To be able to answer -- perhaps in English, perhaps in Japanese -- indicates a very deep level of understanding. This works with stories, song, and poems -- almost any narrative input. The students who do this are processing at a deep level. Far deeper that knowing where Helen Keller was sitting. They know where they are sitting.

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Barrett's Taxonomy What is Barrett's Taxonomy? In order to track how your students are processing information in their reading activities, there is a scale of comprehension called Barrett's Taxonomy. By using of Barrett's scale of comprehension below, you can ensure a balance between all 5 levels. 1. Literal (Lowest) Students identify information directly stated. 2. Reorganization Students organize or order the information in a different way than it was presented. 3. Inference Students respond to information implied but not directly stated. 4. Evaluation Students make judgments in light of the material. 5. Appreciation (Highest) Students give an emotional or image-based response.

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